Rubik's Cube 25th Anniversary

26 July 2005

Tuesday 26 July 2005 was the 25th anniversary of the launch of the
Rubik's
Cube. I was lucky enough to be part of the official birthday celebrations - including the
birthday party and speedcubing demonstrations at Hamley's Toy Store on
Regent Street in London! I also did TV interviews for CNN, ITV News and ITV1's
This Morning show, two radio interviews, a photo shoot at Hamleys and a magazine interview for
TNT
magazine. It was all so much fun - I loved being a celebrity for the day! :)

Below are some photos from the Rubik's Cube birthday party at Hamleys. These
photos were taken by my wonderful fiancÚ, Peter.

Dan and I with Jack. Jack won a contest for a trip to the Rubik's birthday party and a Hamleys gift voucher.I hope he spent some of the gift voucher on cubes! :)

There was a professional photographer at the Rubik's birthday party.Here he's taking a pic of me in front of the enormous Rubik's Cube.

Another pic of me and the giant Rubik's Cube.
The guy in this picture is the photographer, who is telling me how to pose for the next photo.

Isn't this giant cube awesome??

Here's one of the radio reporters interviewing Dan

Not sure what the interviewer just said, but it was obviously pretty funny!

Dan just after a solve for the radio interviewer. Believe it or not, 19.45 seconds is a bad time for Dan! He did a lot of solves much faster than that during the day. The radio interviewer was commentating in the background which I think distracted Dan during his solve, hence the "slow" time of 19.45 seconds ;)

Here's me doing a solve for the radio guy. I'm 1.61 seconds into the solve so
I must be doing the cross (i.e first step of my solve).

Now I'm 17.70 seconds into the solve. Looking at the cube in my hands I'd say
that I'd just finished the F2L (first 2 layers) and had just started to orient
the last layer edges. I was pretty happy with this solve since it's not terribly
common for me to finish the F2L in under 20 seconds. I ended up getting 30.42
seconds for the complete solve. This is faster than my current average so I was happy. I'd love to do this time in my next competition!

This guy is another Australian. He was from Adelaide. He could solve the cube, but his times were well over a minute.
He showed me how he solves so I could offer tips about how to get faster. He
method was cross, first layer corners, middle layer edges, then a 4-look last layer. Looking at how I'm holding the cube and the cubies I'm pointing to, I must have been explaining to him the benefits of moving to F2L pairs.